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bryant

Before your edit:

The world wide web: https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web

certain medical imaging: https://home.cern/news/news/knowledge-sharing/medipix-partic...

grid computing advances: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00104...

PIMMS: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4724719/

Medicis: https://home.cern/news/news/accelerators/cern-accelerates-me...

FLASH radiotherapy: https://home.cern/news/news/knowledge-sharing/cern-chuv-and-...

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After your edit:

No, not yet, but those are long tail efforts. The technologies are the short term yield.

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It’s an interesting question. After all we were using electricity, batteries, electric motors, radios and telegraphs long before we ever discovered electrons and photons.

But discovering the electron was necessary for us to develop vacuum tubes. And developing quantum mechanics was necessary for developing transistors.

Think about the relative impact of the telegraph vs the vacuum tube.

When we do eventually find something to do with the W and Z bosons, it’s likely to look more like a transistor-level tech than an immediately practical tool like a lightbulb. But the second-order effects from whatever that new tech turns out to be, have the potential to be world-shattering.

Quantum Mechanics, protons, electrons... That's the theory of everyday matter. You don't need very special situations to see their effects. Understanding the underlying equations enabled us to do more with what we already have.

High energy stuff only exists unstably for fractions of seconds. I find the idea that any of Standard Model physics, nevermind beyond standard model physics, could lead to a technological advance like the transistor extremely unconvincing.

Technological advance and scientific advance sometimes align. But there is no law that the former by necessity follows from the former. The expectation that they do is an extrapolation from a very brief period of human history.

I don't know why you were getting down voted for this. Discovery during technological development of scientific instrumentation is one of the greatest returns on investment of funding pure science research. And like your sibling comment says, the pure science helps direct applied science, eg cutting edge materials science. Long tail, if for no other reason, because its a whole other development process that happens after the pure science.

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